dictate your every word, you bright nymphs

mistake the possible. Thank you for the plangent

note, the sacrifices that were not at all intended

as an offering. The snare you prepared with the guile

of an anxious siren. If I was ungrateful, I was startle-

hitched. If I tried to be direct, or refused

to condemn, there was something knowledgeable.

Here we mistook the gun who was neither bodyguard

nor the decent acquisition of lymph-yielding limbs.

The rustic incursions of cellophane lips. There is nothing

in you that is not interrupted by flow in the opposite direction.

The capacity of an imperium is the power to command

but how can ridicule sustain this kind of asymmetry?

Why would I erase you when one fatal day I might find you

in your own dress? What more could I have to say to you

that is not a swarm of twentieth century cavalcade?

To pluralise one’s contractions with an apostrophe is a sign

of trustworthiness, the formal vanity of the tuxedoed

vernacular. Everything that is hidden becomes crucial.

So why do things light up when you go away, but go away

when you come near? I fear I must keep you with me at all

times, without knowing what this might suggest. The radical

social and cultural delinquency of thought shivvies,

asks ‘what if you are the envoy of smaller things?’

The problem is: you are prose and I am lacking a differential

topology of holes. Shooting out radicle sense-organs causes

arctic overload, you split into non-commodifiable units of

paraphrase. If you think of me at all it is to replicate

my need, harvested from the vertical Norwegian glassfields.

Everything I see and hear reminds me of you. Vegetables

left to rot in the car overnight, the boisterous dysrhythmia

of hunger. Extension du domaine de la lutte. Melodies

of songs that you wrote but never listened to. Tagging

the Elwood estuaries with a bag full of poppies, eating Pho

in a Vietnamese diner. Choosing between pale ale and desire.

Is this our ruination in reverse? We are carbon neutral,

paid-up members of the union at the end of history.

We are kosher. We are sweet. We are all doors open

for business. I see nothing in your eyes but pure belonging.

For those who have nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

Like a man who has seen too much, I am tamed in the snare

of an earlier desire. We are dreaming in tandem now,

in this life that is not a dream. Not fearful but minuscule, Decisive.